RIM Blackberry Pearl Flip Phone Unveiled at Show

The premier fall cell-phone industry show, the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show in San Francisco, is long on data services this year and short on brand new handsets. Aside from some expected Apple iPhone-killers, there are some new cell phone designs that you need to know about, the most important being the new phone just announced by Research In Motion(RIM Quote).

The first BlackBerry flip phone -- the Pearl Flip -- will go on sale later this year at T-Mobile. It is included in our CTIA photo gallery here.

The BlackBerry Pearl 8220 lives up to its flip nickname. It looks and acts like the standard Blackberry Pearl -- with a two-letters-per-key keypad. Only this new design has a flip-down cover for the big screen and a second screen on the outside of the flip which shows you the current time, previews messages and displays incoming phone numbers.

There's also built-in Wi-fi, mobile streaming, video recording and lots more. The 8220 will run on T-Mobile's 2.5G EDGE network. That means it's plenty fast enough for e-mail data while barely using battery power.

T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom(DTl Quote), has yet to announce the price for the Pearl 8820.

Nokia(NOK Quote) made an interesting announcement at the conference -- a new agreement it has reached with Microsoft (MSFT Quote)about Exchange e-mail.

The Finnish handset maker announced it is adding Exchange Active Sync features to 43 Nokia devices. Those devices represent about 80 million devices in the field. That means that the company will embed Exchange Active Sync on on all its N and E-series devices in the coming months.

Source: RIM/Blackberry

And MobiTV unveiled its new Mobi4BIZ service. As you might have guessed, it's a pay-for video service which delivers up-to-the-minute business and finance news right to a mobile device.

Mobi4BIZ will combine live TV and video-on-demand content from CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business and TheStreet.com. There will be real-time stock data too.

Mobi4BIZ has a user-customized viewing list that will give subscribers the data and video they choose as most important. Each time users log in, new clips will be displayed as thumbnails for browsing. I have to admit that even in beta form it looks very cool.

The new service is set to be rolled out on the new Blackberry Bold. That new handset should go on sale early next month. The price of the new service should cost less than $10 a month.